The purpose of this blog is to provide a holding, attuned, and provocative space for the mysteries of your heart to unfold. All of you is welcome here, in all of your glory - the painful, the joyous, the heartbroken, and the weary. The invitation is to see your entire life as an expression of high-voltage, creative guidance, and for you to offer yourself to the endless and infinite dimension of love that is emerging within and around you right now.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Left with an unwavering faith in love’s perfection…

How can we ever really know what love wants of us, how
life wishes to move through us, how it will distribute its light through the
broken-open cracks of our being, making use of these bodies, these hearts, and
these senses to express its transformative majesty in the world of time and
space? It is so natural, in a way, to desire to get as quickly as possible from
here to there – from the mess and muck and gooey, stickiness of the relative,
of intimacy, of relationships, of emotional intensity – to the absolute, to
God, to peace, to happiness, to the right spiritual thoughts and feelings, to
some pre-packaged set of experiences that demonstrate that everything is okay,
safe, secure, resolved, wrapped up in a tidy life-package that we can finally
rest in and find ground.

This is so understandable, and so wired into us in a
certain way. But the heart knows nothing about these things. It knows nothing
of resolution, of everything being okay, of some final certainty, of holding it
all together, of figuring it out, of some landing place, of some newly assigned
spiritual identity, constructed out of our own hopes, fears, and dreams. It
does know, though, that in any moment the beloved, in whatever form she chooses
to take – sometimes sweetly and often fiercely – will bring into our lives
whatever it must to take us deeper into the mysteries of love. And that this
movement will take us apart. More often than not, this process takes us
directly into the end of our world, into the disassembling of everything we
thought we knew – about love, about intimacy, about spirituality, about our
fables of awakening, about who and what we are, about what we believe we need
to be happy, about the terror of vulnerability, about the raging fires of
relationship, about how we can best honor this gift of human life that we have
been given.

In this sort of acausal, ahistorical, unbearably alive
place, where our concepts, fantasies, and superstitions disintegrate in that
vastness that we are, we may see that the path has very little to do,
ultimately, with traveling from “here to there” – with making some legendary
journey, from human to Divine, from relative to Absolute, from yucky to yummy,
ending in some mythological sustained transcendent experience that we can claim
for ourselves and shout out to the world. We wonder if it may instead be about
stepping outside of this construction altogether. We intuit that this is what
is being asked of us, however we also know on some level that to do so would
result in a certain devastation, in the end of our world as we know it,
including the dissolution of each and every one of our spiritual identities. Do
we really want to surrender in this way? What about me and my realizations? Me
and my “awakening?” Me and my fabulously awesome spiritual experiences? What
about everything I’ve been taught? What about all of those really cool
spiritual beliefs and ideas I’ve learned and memorized and can recite so
clearly? These and other invitations come pouring out of the unknown, dripping
into and through our hearts, asking us to open to the immensity of what is
actually being asked here, of what is truly required.

Rather than organizing our experience around how we will
get to the Absolute (often, of course, in very subtle and unconscious ways), we
watch in awe the mysteries of the movement of love as it pours through the
relative, unleashing itself in time and space, taking form as these bodies,
these senses, our relationships, our sexuality, each surge of feeling and
emotion, and the ways we speak, touch, and hold another. We are in awe at how
the unknown enters into this sacred world of time and space, revealing itself
beyond our conceptual understanding, hopes, and fears. We are so curious as to
how the Absolute will express as and through the relative, crafting each of us
as alchemical vessels of love in action. We start to see so clearly how this
life may not ultimately be about reaching out for more grace, seeking more
experiences, establishing new very groovy spiritual identities, grasping at
more spiritual states of consciousness, believing in one spiritual superstition
and magical tale after another, and coming up with new spiritual ways to see
ourselves. But rather, we are asked to take a risk, to surrender everything so
that we may come to know the movement of love and how it wishes to wash through
our organs, our eyes, our hearts, our bodies, pouring out through our words,
our hands, out of every crack and crevice of everything that we are.

We are endlessly amazed and in awe at such intelligence
and such creativity – of the movement of those same energies which birthed the
stars and the moon and the tides and designed the cells of this human heart –
left with an almost unbearable gratitude, and an unwavering faith in love’s perfection.

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About Me

I am a psychotherapist, author, and teacher, working with individuals and groups worldwide. My latest book, The Path is Everywhere, will be available in June 2017. To learn more about me and my work, please visit my website.

I have a PhD in psychology, where my research interests included
contemporary psychodynamic/ relational theory as well as mindfulness-based, contemplative approaches to psychological healing and spiritual transformation. I have long been interested in the dialogue
between Western, developmental and meditative methods of
inquiry and practice.

I worked in the publishing field for over 24 years, most recently Director of Professional Studies for Sounds True, where I organized online training for mental health professionals seeking to deepen their practice in areas such as attachment, trauma, neuroscience, and mindfulness.